I code websites for a living. So it’s not a surprise that I hear the question from a lot of people, “So I’m thinking about redesigning my website, what do you think of . . . ?” How people finish that question ranges from color preferences to the benefits of certain technical features. On occasion I offer my advise or my opinion if it’s something I feel strongly about, but the majority of the time my answer is, “I don’t know, have you looked at your analytics?”

Analytics, anlytics, analytics. I can’t stress it enough Personally I would never redesign a website without first studying the data.

If you aren’t familiar with analytics for a website, it’s a snippet of code that is included on your page that sends information about your users back to a source that compiles all of that data. Google Analytics is a popular provider, but there are lots of other data collecting services out there. It’s nothing invasive or private but important things like how long did a viewer stay on the site, what pages were visited most, what  keywords were used or what search engine led users to the site. It can even show data like screen dimensions, browsers or operating system of your users. All of which can be very important when considering making changes to your website.

Naturally all of us that have put up or maintain some sort of web presence feel our content is important. We all have this idea that there are people out there just waiting to read or see what we have to published. Which may indeed be the case, but what if you learned that not a single person was getting to your site? What if you discovered that every visitor you had clicked away from the site within seconds of seeing a page. That tells you something right? Something is broken. Perhaps you’re not sure if you are using space on your site properly and want to make it wider to accommodate more information,  when in truth all of your users have very narrow screens. Wouldn’t you want to know that before you change your layout?

Your web designer won’t look at the site again after she’s done designing it for you, your brother-in-law doesn’t look at or use your website regularly, in fact there is a good chance that you don’t even use your own site as much as others do. Don’t build a website for your designer, not your uncle, not me, not even for yourself. Build it to meet the needs of your customers and you can do that by getting their opinion directly from their behavior. That behavior is shown in the analytics.

Redesigning a website can do as much damage as it can good. When done properly your site will become more efficient and successful over time. You will learn the habits and preferences of your audience and adapt your presence to meet their needs for a positive reaction. If you ignore those needs and users are not finding your site useful they will tell you in how they behave.

If you are not sure if your site is gathering analytics, talk to whoever built your site and get them to add them immediately or sign up for a service like Google Analytics and follow their instructions to add them yourself. If your site does have data, get that data before you start the redesign process. Otherwise you may be in for a longer, more frustrating process that may or may not even be helping your site.

Good luck, happy redesigning.

Our family enjoys backpacking. For a recent trip we felt it was important that our 2 (nearly 3) year old son begin to carry a few of his own supplies. But we ran into a snag; it’s difficult to find a “real” backpack for a toddler. I checked online for toddler hiking backpacks but was surprised to find nothing. There are plenty of backpacks to carry a toddler in or backpacks made for toddlers to carry, but all were geared for books or school. We needed something with multiple pockets, durable and flexible if he was going to do any hiking with it.

I made a few trips to local retailers, outdoor outfitters and major department stores. Closest one I could find was a woman’s day pack at EMS, but it was a $100 and if the bag was loaded he certainly would not have been able to carry it.  I went back to the internet where I found some advice on doing it yourself.

I can’t remember the site, but the idea was buried deep in a forum on the subject: convert a camelbak into a toddler backpack. Seemed simple enough and I learned a few things about the process that I figured it may be helpful to share, in case anyone out there is doing a similar search and coming up with no results.

So here are some steps on how I made a toddler hiking and travel backpack

1. Picked up a simple Camelbak – in our department store search we found a very small Camelbak at Walmart for something like $20. The bag itself was the perfect size for a toddler, but of course the straps were designed for an adult. So we had to do some adjusting.
2. Remove water bladder - Of course he wasn’t just going to pack around a ton of water. We removed the bladder system to free up space for his clothes and gear.
3. Tighten down all the straps – Just as you’d expect I tightened the straps as far as they could go and wrapped the excess in black tape to get out of the way. But even pulled all the way tight there was too much give and not fitting right on his shoulders.
4. Relocated the front chest strap - What normally lines up with an adults chest came to about the belly of my son. The straps on the model we purchased were restricted from going further up by some stitches. We cut the stitches which then allowed us to relocate the cross-chest strap up to his actual chest level. That did a lot to add stability.
5. Use a flexible chord to tie in the shoulder straps to appropriate length – Despite tightening all of the straps and relocating them to the correct placement the shoulder straps were still simply too long. The backpack was hanging off his back and the unsecured weight was too much for him to handle or be comfortable with. I had previously purchased a tent pole replacement kit that included extra stretchable chord. It occurred to me to use the chord to tie in the excess straps. Using the hole that the water tube typically goes down I strung chord down and tied it near the chest strap. I then strung the chord back up into the backpack and down the other side, pulled tight and and tied off. Excess chord was ran just straight back into the backpack through the same hole for the water. (See pictures at the bottom)

That last step did the trick perfectly. The backpack fit snug on his back and he was then able to carry the load. The stretchable chord was the key. It allowed the bag to fit tight on his back but the straps remained very flexible. On occasion I need to take his pack off and on quickly while we travel so having the flexible straps makes that easy. On outings where my wife and I need to leave our bigger packs behind and carry a day pack, we simply untie the chord on my son’s backpack, loosen the straps and it becomes instantly available to use as a day pack for an adult.

My son really loves having his own real backpack. He feels involved and challenged and everywhere we go people compliment him on it which really makes him proud carry his own things. I still can’t believe with how many people hike and travel that no one offers a legitimate backpack option for a 2 or 3 year old.

Steps with images are provided below.

I wanted to take a moment to introduce the new site. I’ll explain a little of my thought process and how I came up with what I did for the site from design to functionality. Before I begin I must say that the things I write about in this post will and should change with time. A website is a unique medium that has the ability to grow and change with time. As technologies advance, so to capabilities, content should be dynamic, and it’s my aim to develop the site for you and me. You being the reader. I would love feedback and comments on the site. Please feel free to email me using the comment form in the bottom right hand corner or in a comment on the site. Anyways, on to the list.

All my content in one place: Blogs traditionally have a navigation bar across the top or a column of navigation options on the side. Often times the navigation bar on the top direct to static pages, while the blog sidebar handles the different blog post options. I wanted to make the focus of the site the content, rather than the navigation. To do that I made a clear differentiation on the site from navigation to content. Basically everything on the main portion of the site is content. Blog posts and information take up the left 2/3 with a sidebar with additional information in the right 1/3 column. The information in that column represents information posted by me in other places on the web. Most popular are facebook and twitter, but I also keep up an occasional blog on Fannation.com and keep an up to date list on Scordit.com. That right hand column will continue to grow I suspect as new services become available and popular, but I wanted one place to showcase that data.

Two blogs in one: One of the biggest challenges of my previous blog was my audience. I’d say 90% of my readership was my family. We use blogs on occasion in our family to keep in touch with each other and friends. As my career in web development continues however I found a growing need to expand my audience. The thoughts and things I wanted to share went beyond the scope of my family, not to mention I did not want to direct that kind of attention to my personal life. My initial thought was to just make two separate blogs. Makes sense right? Family could go to one, public goes to another. But that wasn’t quite what I was going for. I wanted one single system to handle both. I wanted to go to one place and one system to get my information out all under one consistent brand. Not to mention the time and money it takes to upkeep both projects. I wanted to consolidate that work into one place. bryankwilliams.com has become that one place.

You’ll notice right off the bat there are 2 main sections of the site, the design/development blog and the family blog. Family is a section meant for family and friends. I discuss things more of a personal nature and write about topics that my family and friends would be interested, while the design and development blog handle more of a public nature. A place to discuss web development/design techniques or other things like sports or politics.

So this was the solution, a blog that on the surface was strictly public, with the option to sign in to view more personal content. The permissions issues and accessing on the site depending on logging in will change and adapt as time goes on and what I find effective.

Facebook Integration: Facebook isn’t just a buzzword. If I was going to have a system to login and view my blog with friends and family there was no way I could ask them all to create new user accounts just for my site. I needed to find a way to make that process easier for them. Because a lot of the online family interaction that happens now is on Facebook I decided to investigate Facebook Connect features into the site. Again, I believe that connection will increase as new things become available, but right now you can sign into the site using Facebook credentials and do things like sharing the stories and comment on your wall.

Sharing  via FB, Digg, & Twitter: I won’t lie, I’m bias to the systems that I use regularly. I love twitter for example. I check my feed regularly and love to share what I’m doing or when I find things I love to retweet them. I also use Digg, so I decided to make easy buttons for readers to share my content. That’s not really the case with family posts, so I decided to get rid of them on a family post, but if you find a public post helpful or entertaining, it’s now easy to share.

Interaction: Like I mentioned before, it was my aim to make a living, breathing website. I want to provide the latest content about myself and encourage discussion or interaction on the site. To help this I’ve tried to incorporate specific things. I wanted a clear and easy to find contact form. It’s located in the bottom right hand corner of every single page. I also want to hear from the readers via comments. I love getting others’ opinions or take. I understand I have my biases and perspective on things and I love hearing things from another point of view. In fact, if you have any ideas on how to make the site more interesting and interactive please let me know. I’ve thought about having a place for polls or drag and drop interactive pieces, but I’m not sure if it’s really what the users want at this point.

Flexible Design: This is more of a technical and design trait, but I wanted to make the site fluid to fill any screen size. Almost every other website I’ve designed and developed for have had a fixed width to this point. I wanted to break out and do it a little different with this one. There is a minimum point the site needs to be and you’ll see that if you try to shrink your browser smaller, but I wanted to make it expandable as screen sizes and resolutions are growing so much, I don’t want to have to redesign the site as it grows and leave older users behind. This option makes it dynamic and hopefully look good for everyone. Another feature that I have planned and will implement in the near future is an iphone and ipod touch specific theme. Mobile content is only getting more popular and I certainly appreciate it when a site has a good iphone version. I’ve done it for some others sites and plan to have it in the coming couple months.

Interesting & well designed content: I enjoyed using blogger for my previous blogging needs but there were so many times that I said to myself, “man this is a pain,” or “I’d really wish I could do (blank).” With the new site I want to make the posts as interesting as the content that  is written. There is a post image for every post going forward, that will make it easy to look at the page or post and know immediately the topic. I also wanted to include photos and videos. Not just 1 or 2 small pictures, but a lot of larger photos and blogger just didn’t have the tools to make that very easy. I now will be incorporating entire photo albums, pull quotes, video and other things to make the post more pleasing to look at.

WordPress: I built the site using the WordPress platform. I know that doesn’t mean much to most of you, but some of you web developers that have used it can attest that a lot of really cool tools are built right into WordPress that I can leverage. like an iphone app that allows me to edit and update posts right from my phone, even upload pictures as I’m on the go. There are backup and exporting features that I can move the blog later on. A lot of the content I have right now was imported using tools from my previous blog post. But the biggest thing with that is that I own and control all of my own content. I didn’t like the idea of so much of my personal content being controlled and existing on a service owned by someone else.

So there it is. A break down of what I went with and a little of my thought process behind it. Hopefully the explanation has been helpful and please if you have any ideas or feedback on the site write it in a comment or send me an email.

Bryan Williams

So I’m finally getting around to updating my personal site. It’s been several years now since I put up some of my very first html. I’ve felt like I’ve come a long way since my initial attempts at web design and development. If you want to see or need something on the old version of the site you can click here.

It’s important to know that this site is very much in beta. I’ll be doing a lot of development on it in the next couple months and I will be posting a lot more content on it in the future. So please be patient and come back often for updates on what I’m up to and adding.